Kestrel rebuilds every remittance you receive against your vendor agreement, your price file and your shipment record. Deductions, short-pays, unapplied credits, invoices that were never paid at all. We assemble the documentation, file the disputes, and work the recurring codes until they stop coming back.
No recovery, no fee, and no claim floor. A $180 compliance code that hits forty times a year costs you more than the single $9,000 shortage everyone chases. It is also the one a firm with a $2,500 minimum will never open.
Anyone whose money shows up net of someone else's math.
Walmart, Target, Kroger, Costco, Albertsons, Amazon. Shortage claims, OTIF fines, allowance rates that don't match the agreement, price-file drift after every cost change.
Co-op and MDF deducted above the contracted rate, on invoices the program never covered.
When one check covers 400 invoices and eleven adjustment codes, cash application becomes the bottleneck and the short-pays quietly become write-offs at month end.
Unapplied cash and short-pays with no claim behind them at all, never disputed because nobody found them.
Long lead times mean the claim arrives after the container, the buyer, and sometimes the season. Post-audit firms re-claim things that were settled two years ago.
Duplicate and post-audit claims against invoices that were already reconciled and closed.
The distributor deduction file and the direct-retail file are two different problems that net against the same P&L. We reconcile them together, in one report.
The same promotion funded twice, once through the distributor and once through the retailer.
And your remittance advice is the only place it is ever stated.
The retailer claims the load arrived light, or never arrived. Your bill of lading and signed proof of delivery say otherwise. The deduction stands anyway, because disputing it means somebody has to pull the paperwork and nobody has the time.
You agreed to a 5% co-op allowance in the vendor agreement. The deduction comes through at 8%, or against invoices the program never covered. Nobody is checking each deduction line against the contract that authorized it.
The most expensive line on a remittance is often the one with no deduction code at all. An invoice short-paid by four hundred dollars, or not paid. It reconciles to nothing, so it ages into a write-off.
We work deductions, and we work them harder than a queue-and-flag tool does. But the money that disappears quietly is usually somewhere else on the remittance: the invoice short-paid with no code on it, the credit that was never applied, the invoice nobody paid at all. Deduction software cannot see those, because it was built to read the deduction line and stop.
| Kestrel | Deduction software | Contingency recovery firms | Your AR team | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What gets looked at | The whole remittance: deductions, short-pays, unapplied cash, unpaid invoices | Deduction lines only | The largest claims | Whatever fits between closes |
| Trading partners covered | Every partner that pays you, reconciled in one file | The ones they've built parsers for | Wherever the big claims are | All of them, in theory |
| Minimum claim size | None. The small recurring codes are the point. | n/a, you do the work | Typically $1,000–$2,500 | None, but no time |
| Who assembles the proof and files | We do. Documentation, filing, escalation, follow-up | You do | They do, on their claims | They try |
| Root cause, so it stops recurring | Yes. A code that repeats monthly is a process defect, not a claim. | No | No. Recurrence is their revenue | Rarely |
| Buyer relationship | A hard constraint. We don't file what costs you more in goodwill than it returns. | Not their problem | Not their problem | Yes |
| You pay when nothing is recovered | No | Yes, monthly | Minimums and retainers | Salaried either way |
Two things follow from that. Most brands we look at have more money sitting in claims under $500 than in claims over $5,000, spread across more codes and more months, so nobody has ever added them up. And a meaningful share of what we recover was never coded as a deduction at all, which means no deduction tool would have surfaced it.
Read-only access to your vendor portals, plus whatever deduction detail already exists on your side. A folder of remittance PDFs is fine. A QuickBooks export with no reason codes is fine. Ninety days instead of twelve months is fine. Assembling it is our job, not your homework. We never need banking access, and we can't change pricing, POs or shipment data.
First we pull and normalize what exists across portals, PDFs and your ledger, because it is never already in one place. Then twelve months of remittances, reconciled claim by claim against the vendor agreement, the invoice, the price file and the shipment record. Deductions get a basis test. Short-pays and unapplied cash get traced to an invoice or flagged as unexplained.
One report, by trading partner and deduction code: what was taken without basis, what's still inside the window, and what we expect to win. Weighted per category rather than as a single blended number. You approve every claim before it moves.
We assemble the documentation, file through each partner's process, and escalate what stalls. Then we work the recurring codes upstream: routing guide, ASN accuracy, allowance setup, cost sync. The aim is that the same deduction stops regenerating next quarter.
Three numbers you already know, against bands we publish below. This is arithmetic on assumptions, not a finding — it exists to tell you whether the exercise is worth an hour of your time. The engine replaces it with your actual file.
Read it off one remittance: total deducted ÷ gross invoiced. If you have never measured it, leave it where it is.
Where the bands come from, so you can argue with them. The 8–25% disputable band and the 45–75% recovery band are the working assumptions Kestrel prices against; they are drawn from what deduction categories look like across the engagements and public benchmarks we have seen, not from your business. A brand with clean ASN compliance and one retailer will sit under the low end. A brand carrying post-audit claims across ten partners will sit over the high end and the number above will understate it. Neither case is knowable from three sliders, which is the point of running the engine on the real file.
Read-only, always. We never ask for banking credentials, and we cannot change pricing, POs or shipment data in your systems.
Nothing is filed without your written sign-off, claim by claim. You see the full list before any of it moves.
Every claim carries a record of what was tested, what failed the test, what was sent, and what came back. Exportable at any time.
Buyer exposure is reviewed before anything escalates. We will tell you when a winnable claim is not worth the goodwill.
Findings inside five business days of access. Ongoing engagements reconcile each remittance in the week it lands.
Held for the engagement and no longer. Returned or destroyed when it ends, on your instruction.
It can, done badly. A buyer controls shelf position and reorder quantity, and a brand that disputes everything gets a reputation. So we file where the documentation is clean, word every claim as a reconciliation rather than a complaint, and keep out of your merchant team's inbox with things that belong in AP. If a claim is winnable but not worth the goodwill, we say so and drop it.
Software tells you a line looks wrong. It won't pull the signed POD, build the packet, file it, chase the denial, or go argue with a supply chain manager about the routing guide behind it. It also misses the invoice short-paid by $412 with no code on it at all. Most of our clients keep their software. We do the part that needs a person.
Depends on the category, and you see which is which before anything is filed. Duplicates, deductions bigger than the invoice they hit, and shortages with a signed POD behind them are close to arithmetic. Allowances and compliance fines get argued. Post-audit is the hardest, because the burden of proof is yours. Anyone quoting one blended number is averaging things that behave nothing alike.
Twelve months, to find the patterns. Windows vary by partner and by what your agreement actually says, so we confirm yours instead of assuming. Older claims still get documented even when they can't be filed. A code that repeats every month is usually a fixable process problem, and the history is the evidence for that conversation.
Read-only on your vendor portals. Your deduction, remittance and open-invoice detail. Vendor agreements with the allowance, co-op and OTIF terms. Your current price and cost file. Shipment records: BOLs, signed PODs, ASN data. No banking access, and we can't change anything in your systems.
No, and almost nobody's are. What most brands have is a folder of remittance PDFs, a portal that only exports 90 days at a time, and a QuickBooks account where deductions landed as short-paid invoices with no reason code on them. Assembling that into something reconcilable is the job, not the prerequisite. Give us portal access and whatever you already have and we build the file. If the data were clean and in one place you could run this yourself, and you would not need us.
Filing is quick once the backup exists. Gathering the backup and waiting on the partner is the slow part. KeHE resolves a K-Solve case in roughly three weeks; UNFI runs 35–45 days; the big retailers vary widely and escalated claims take longer. The thing that actually costs you money is not review time, it is a window closing while nobody has pulled the POD.
Yes, and for some brands you should. Every partner gives you a dispute channel, KeHE through K-Solve and UNFI through its Dispute Center, and filing into them is free. The hard part is deciding which lines are worth disputing and assembling the documents before the window closes. If your team has those hours, run the analyzer on this site, take the letters, and file them yourself. If they do not, that is what we are for.
The analyzer on this site is free, unlimited, and stays that way. Beyond it the work is contingency-first: we are paid out of what actually comes back, and nothing at all if nothing does. No minimum claim size, no setup fee, nothing to sign up front. We quote the ongoing work against your real deduction volume rather than a published tier, because until we have reconciled your file we would be guessing and you would be paying for the guess. Ask for a quote when you send your details, or email ryan@kestreldeductions.com and we will walk you through it.
Load a deduction, remittance or chargeback export, set the terms from your vendor agreement, and Kestrel rebuilds every claim from scratch. Every line opens into a working paper: the test it failed with the numbers shown, the single document that settles it, and a dispute letter drafted against that partner’s process.
Parsing and reconciliation run entirely in your browser. No server, no retention window, no account. Close the tab and it is gone.
Each disputable line comes with a dispute letter drafted from its own numbers and addressed to that partner. Most tools stop at telling you something looks wrong.
The report names the codes that keep coming back and what each costs you annually — the number that decides whether to file or to fix.
Drop a deduction or remittance CSV here
Retailer or distributor AP deduction detail, chargeback export, or remittance advice
A CSV is what this in-browser demo can read. It is not what an engagement needs. Most brands send us portal access and a folder of remittance PDFs, and we build the file.
No file handy? Run the engine against a realistic 12-month deduction file for a mid-size brand shipping to three retailers.
The engine and the full report stay open to everyone, no account needed. We only ask who you are when you want to leave with the findings, the letters or the PDF. One field set, no password, no follow-up sequence.
Your remittance file is not part of this and never was. It has not left your browser and it is not going to.
Two minutes now. Findings back within five business days of access. No cost, no commitment, no card, and the report is yours to keep whether or not you continue. You do not need your deductions organized first, and you can ask for a quote in the same breath.
* Required — everything else helps us scope the reconciliation but isn't essential.
We'll reply with an access checklist, and a quote if you asked for one. Read-only portal and remittance access only, and no banking credentials, ever.
The first three stages cost nothing and end with a report you keep whether or not you carry on.